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More than just one movie, but a movie experience, GRINDHOUSE gives movie fans a double bill with Robert Rodriguez’s PLANET TERROR and Quentin Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF. This celebration of 1970s and 1980s exploitation cinema embraces the no hold’s barred attitude of those films, playing many conventions for laughs. At over three hours, horror fans really get their money’s worth with two solid entertaining films as well as some nice fake trailers from directors Rob Zombie (DEVIL’S REJECTS), Eli Roth (HOSTEL) and Edgar Wright (SHAUN OF THE DEAD).

The experience kicks off with a Rodriguez directed trailer for a film called MACHETE starring Danny Trejo. It nails the low-budget revenge flick vibe perfectly and starts off the night with a bang. With the line “They messed with the wrong Mexican,” the trailer felt like a Latino version of the blaxploitation hit, THE MACK or SUPERFLY. Then we move into the first feature, PLANET TERROR. Rodriguez’s zombie epic finds solider Muldoon (Bruce Willis, SIN CITY) unleashing a disease on a small Texas town when a deal with the scientist Abby (Naveen Andrews, TV’s LOST) goes wrong. On the run from the “Sickos” go-go dancer turned wannabe stand-up comedian Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan, TV’s CHARMED) loses a leg, but in the process rekindles her relationship with her tough as nail boyfriend El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez, TV’s SIX FEET UNDER). The survivors along for the ride include syringe-gun toting anesthesiologist Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton, THE LAST KISS), Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn, TERMINATOR), the sheriff’s bbq chef brother J.T. (Jeff Fahey, THE LAWNMOWER MAN) and Dakota’s father/ ex-sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, KILL BILL, VOL. 2).

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Will Smith gives the best performance of his career in a drama that reminds us that there’s always someone who has it rougher than we do. But in the end, smarts and hard work can accomplish anything. As Smith said while promoting the film, the true-life story of Chris Gardner is what the American Dream is built on.

Smith plays Gardner, a salesman who used his family’s life savings to buy bone density scanners. However, Gardner’s dreams of making it big in the bone density scanner business don’t pan out as he expected. His wife Linda (Thandie Newton, CRASH), who has to work long hours just to put food on the table, looks at Chris’ latest business venture as just another one of his pie in the sky schemes. As the trailer tells us, she leaves him with their young son Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, TV’s ALL OF US) right as he’s trying to become a stockbroker intern. The film goes on to chronicle the many hardships that Gardner must endure as he tries to raise his son alone while competing for a single shot at getting hired as a stockbroker.

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SILENT HILL is about as much fun as watching someone else play a videogame. There hasn’t been a good movie based on a game yet, and there never will be unless someone realizes that the engine that drives a videogame is not the same as a feature film. We need characters we care about in situations where we want to see them succeed. Getting past the next “level” is not as rewarding when we’re spectators and not participants. The film thrusts us into the action right off the bat.

Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell, MELINDA AND MELINDA) desperately runs from her house looking for her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland, TIDELAND), whose sleepwalking is getting dangerous. Rose’s husband Christopher (Sean Bean, FLIGHTPLAN) wants to take Sharon to a doctor, but Rose decides to steal their daughter and take her to the ghost town Silent Hill, West Virginia, which her young girl seems to be obsessed with. When Rose and Sharon get close to Silent Hill, which was abandoned due to a coal mine fire burning under the town, they arouse the suspicions of police officer Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden, THE MAJESTIC). When Rose is pulled over, she runs from the cops and ends up crashing her car right outside Silent Hill. When she wakes up her daughter is gone and she seems trapped in the strange town where ash rains from the sky and demons and monsters (both human and non-human) inhabit the town.

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